Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or profit from the publication of this material
Warnings: Drugs and sexual situations as well as copious amounts of SAT vocabulary
Paradigm Shift
Chapter One
Pedagogy and Theory
It was somewhat of a revelation.
Not the epiphany-ish your life is irrelevant and there are no answers kind. But the Oh, holy shit, all along I've thought that color was called viridian and it's actually called chartreuse sort. Yeah, maybe not the most apt way to explain it, but that's how it felt to Sakura. As if she had been walking around her entire life labeling objects colored unpleasantly yellow-green -- like vomit, or pestilence, or that terrible sweater her Grandma gave her on her twentieth birthday – as viridian, for god's sake!
Sakura possessed a particularly strong memory, bolstered by the existence of a home movie, of her father standing above her and watching her babyish form through the scope of a brand new video camera. She was sitting on the thick brocaded carpet, haloed by construction paper and accordions of white computer paper marred with strident gashes of 'artwork', markers that smelled like concordant fruits -- banana for yellow, apple for green, and, shockingly, orange for orange – and the ubiquitous childhood necessity of a sixty-four box of crayons, separated categorically by color, shade, and usefulness, for she was meticulous even as a child.
"Sakura show Daddy the red crayon," his voice rung from behind the mechanical eye, more like the large bell in the tower in the center of the village that divided the daytime into twenty-four equal fifty-nine minute increments of silence between minute long spans of sonorous cacophony, than the entirely personable lilt in the affectation of her Mommy's voice. Toddler Sakura continued right along ignoring him, mutilating a fresh leaf of construction paper with fervent little slashes, refusing to submit to her Daddy's Chronos-like demands since it was not the time for such frivolities as labels. "Sakura!" his voice chimed again, more demanding. The little girl looked up at him then, and somehow, her baby imp eyes conveyed a tinge of dismay, as if to say 'Now is not the time for banal demands you philistine. Can't you see that what I'm creating here is A-R-T?' Nevertheless, little Sakura relented and reached chubby little cherub hands into her box to withdraw a waxy little stick and hold it up towards him. "Very good baby-girl, you're so smart. Now show me green. Ga-re-ee-n."
If it was possible for a toddler to understand that the action of rolling one's eyes very strongly conveyed both a sense of exasperation and a rejection of the ridiculousness of a situation, little Sakura would have done so. But having not yet mastered the nuances of pre-symbolic language, other than that crying signaled sadness, hunger, pain, and anger, Sakura was left with a lacking arsenal from which to tell her dad to go the hell away so that she could finish creating her masterpiece. She released the red crayon from her outstretched hand and watched with fascination as the mysterious force of gravity pulled it back down to the littered carpet before reaching back into her multihued box and tugging another free from its cubby hole between similar shaded sticks. With a little squee of glee Sakura flung the crayon at her father's feet – gravity was just fascinating – and looked up at the lens from behind which he watched her. 'There, are you happy,' the tilt of her head seemed to ask, 'may I return to cre-at-ing now?'
Behind the camera, her father pushed a button forward, zooming in on the crayon now lying deathly still at his socked feet, the real victim in all of this. It was perfectly sharp, a very noticeable contrast between its fallen cohort Red, which had been rubbed against paper enough to necessitate even the peeling back of half of the label. But this yellowish-green one was still uncorrupted by friction. It's pristine state of new-crayonishness signaling that it had not yet been used to draw stems and leaves of flowers or grass in Sakura's baby abstract art. Maybe because it was not a true green; its hue was closer to yellow than green in nature, and would be better suited for highlights or reflections in water than for the objects themselves. And since Sakura, as a toddler, had yet hardly grasped the concept of objects or representation, drawing highlights and reflections, characteristics disconnected from the nature of the thing itself, was not a priority. And, thus, this crayon remained an unadulterated member of the green zone in Sakura's well ordered box.
But, alas, it remained that this particular crayon was not really green. And of course, Father Time could not let his little prodigy maintain such a misconception. Green was green because it was, it existed as green in some perfect zone of the ether, where a chair and a table and a bed sore also existed in their perfect forms, at least according to Plato. But Plato aside, Sakura's Daddy had determined that now was the time for learning, so it was necessary to teach his daughter the proper word for this particular shade of light. "Sakura-chan, that's not the green crayon," he lectured the toddler from behind his camera. "That is viridian." Oh really? Because years later Sakura would discover that this color was actually called chartreuse, and that her Daddy, the giver of all knowledge in her formative baby years, had been w-r-o-n-g, wrong. "Can you say viridian? Vi-ri-di-an. Say it baby-girl."
And there it was. The instant in which her father became the perpetrator of decades of misconception. That fiend! To so mislead an impressionable mind, to confuse her system of organizing reality by giving everything – from a cuticle to the planet – a designated name. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" was a line of gross fallacy. Labels mattered. If a rose was called a toilet and a toilet a rose, then a rose certainly would no longer smell as sweet. And her father had built the foundation of her education on this belief. "Sakura-chan, say your ABC's" or "Baby-girl, what is that bird called?" Systematic, stringent, constant, her father's own well founded brand of pedagogy.
It had continued past the toddler years, though it had lost some of the idyllic warmth of a three year old singing the ABC's. "You are made of a different cloth than those shinobi, Sakura-chan. Are you listening? You are too good for that Missy. Your mother and I are well respected in this community and we don't kill for a living." He would hiss the word 'kill' as though it burned his tongue. Because those shinobi killed. They were killers. Killers.
Another label to add to her cache.
But don't be mislead, for even at the age of six, the age when she entered the shinobi academy, Sakura was not. It wasn't truly about the killing. Her mother had never been adverse to spiking a famous red bean bun from her famous bakery with analgesic on the request of a shinobi looking to facilitate an easier assassination, as long as she received proper fiscal compensation. Her father was the foremost supplier of gunpowder to the Daimyo's of both Wind and Fire, among other things. Killers were not necessarily only the people that thrust the knife. Did the person who forged the blade bear no responsibility?
Her parents brand of violence was of another type. Pecuniary. The arms race of things, the proliferation of the newest technology, that rare granite from Iwa for the kitchen remodel, the artisan made kunai gifted to Sakura on her academy graduation – the finest hand forged killing implements in all of Konoha, jewelry that glittered on her mother's appendages like scales on the fishmongers arms, bags, vases, ancient books, exotic teas and china, the exorbitantly priced watch that was always cuffed around her father's wrist.
"Only the best for my daughter," he would bellow. "Eh, Sakura-chan?"
She had ruined the isosceles triangle of her family when she became shinobi. And yet, they somehow still held firm. As if her career choice was now some minor transgression that could be forgiven, as if she was simply experiencing a 'prodigal son' stage from the age of seven on, but would eventually denounce her sophomoric notions of saving the world and return to the fold where the real power was stored in vaults and jewelry cases and stock options and dividends. Where her dowry was well known by all the neighbors and all merchant families with sons of appropriate ages. Where her father knew what was best for his beautiful little daughter, his unwitting apprentice in the truths of the world. Where he would espouse his knowledge in pedestrian little crumbs about how "Money makes the world go round, baby-girl."
But her Daddy had been wrong about the blue-green color called viridian.
vi-ri-di-an
And now, standing inside her sensei's shabby apartment, the word poor echoing around in the uncontrolled convex of her head, Sakura began to wonder how much of her foundation, the paradigm on which she filtered and understood the world around her, was wrong. Her sensei, the man she admired with the same urgency that she clung to her last shreds of innocence, was sprawled across his grungy bed, the one surface in his apartment on which one could sit besides the desk shoved bluntly into the fourth corner, wearing nothing except for a pair of low slung blue pants, a joint perched lazily between his naked lips, and a more naked brunette sleeping with her head cradled in his lap. The room was thick with the green smell of the marijuana, the floor dirty with a pile of carelessly flicked ash, and his one open eye looked back at her with the lazy interest of a sexually satisfied and stoned man. The plush curve of the woman's breast and the light reflecting off the moisture on her spread thighs, the sinewy plane of Kakashi's chest marred by ridges of gnarled scars, the silver line of hair starting at his belly button and going down, down, down—
"Yo," he said as he removed the paper cigarette from his bare lips. "You want to hit this?"
Oh, yes. It was somewhat of a revelation.
A/N: Does your head hurt? Mine does after writing that. One chapter more. Maybe two. No I wasn't high when I wrote this, though I did channel a bit of the memories from my youthful indiscretion. Also, mildly inspired by the narrative style of The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert. To be updated when I get inspired again.
Review you philistines or else I'll send a baked Kakashi to your house to raid your cabinets and your stash.